CentOS virt - Sep 2015 - Beta CentOS 7 Xen packages available

On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 11:02 PM, T.Weyergraf <T.Weyergraf at
virtfinity.de> wrote:
> First of all, I fully agree, that forked repos are undesirable. However, to
> the casual observer (like me), there are hardly any ressources for Xen on
> CentOS 7. There are some beta packages, as announced in the start if this
> thread, with the latest update being 4.4.2 on 4th of august. I have not yet
> found any git repo to check out the current Xen 4 CentOS 7 development
> effort - only the source rpms to the above packages could be used.
Likewise,
> the response on the list on the announcements of the Xen on CentOS 7 beta
> packages was kind of mute and no further updates were given. This led me to
> the - apparently false - assumption, that the project kind of fell asleep.
> I'd be more than happy to at least test development packages and give
> feedback.
>
> Your statement "These RPMs are produced by Citrix, so we need to get
the
> right" irritates me, as I was completely unaware of any
"rights" from Citrix
> to be waited for.
>
> Anyway, I will wait for the official Xen4CentOS packages for CentOS 7 and
> keep my stuff out of the public to avoid useless forks.
So actually, the SIGs are supposed to be community efforts -- and my
long term hope was that once the SIG was "jump-started", that
community members would step up to take over -- or at least step up to
help significantly.

A number of reasons C7 has "stalled":

* Lack of time on my part. I only work 4 days a week for Citrix, and I
have significant other duties.  Normally I can only spend a day or so
a week on CentOS stuff; and in particular, the review load relating to
the 4.6 feature freeze (beginning of July) was very high.  Then I got
married and went on holiday for 3 weeks in August, which also didn't
help. :-)

* Apparent lack of testing by the community. About a month after the
C7 "beta", I was about to announce an actual release, when I happened
to discover that HVM guests wouldn't boot -- not under any
configuration.  This is really basic core functionality that nobody at
all had tested (or if they had they hadn't complained).  This
convinced me that I couldn't rely on community testing, and prompted
me to spend some time writing an automated test suite that would at
least do a basic smoke-test for a number of configurations.  I've got
this working for the core xen package, but I was planning on extending
it to libvirt before declaring CentOS 7 "ready".

I'm sorry I haven't been very pro-active about pushing to the xen
package repository -- I didn't know anyone was looking.  (If you asked
about it, then I must have missed it.)

I would be happy to have help improving the packages.  I would be
*very* happy to have help maintaining the Xen4CentOS packages, and I
would be *delighted* if someone wanted to take over maintainership of
the packages entirely.

FYI I have just finished rebasing things to 4.6-rc2 (there are
packages in virt7-xen-46-candidate now), and am in the process of
switching things over to systemd.

The Virt SIG has IRC meetings on freenode channel #centos-devel every
two weeks -- the next one is today (8 September) at 2pm BST (3pm UTC).
If anyone wants to help contribute / see what the status of Xen4CentOS
is, feel free to pop in.

 -George

On Tue, 2015-09-08 at 12:02 +0100, George Dunlap wrote:
> Then I got married and went on holiday for 3 weeks in August,
Congratulations. Its nicer cuddling a real person rather than a
computer.
> The Virt SIG has IRC meetings on freenode channel #centos-devel every
> two weeks -- the next one is today (8 September) at 2pm BST (3pm UTC).
> If anyone wants to help contribute / see what the status of Xen4CentOS
> is, feel free to pop in.
BST = British Summer Time = GMT/UTC + 1:00.
Thus 14:00 BST = 13:00 UTC.


-- 
Regards,

Paul.
England, EU.      England's place is in the European Union.

On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 12:12 PM, Always Learning <centos at u64.u22.net>
wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2015-09-08 at 12:02 +0100, George Dunlap wrote:
>
>> Then I got married and went on holiday for 3 weeks in August,
>
> Congratulations. Its nicer cuddling a real person rather than a
> computer.
>
>> The Virt SIG has IRC meetings on freenode channel #centos-devel every
>> two weeks -- the next one is today (8 September) at 2pm BST (3pm UTC).
>> If anyone wants to help contribute / see what the status of Xen4CentOS
>> is, feel free to pop in.
>
> BST = British Summer Time = GMT/UTC + 1:00.
> Thus 14:00 BST = 13:00 UTC.
Oops. :-) Just to confirm, this should be the right time (2pm BST).

 -George

On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 7:02 AM, George Dunlap <dunlapg at umich.edu>
wrote:
> * Apparent lack of testing by the community. About a month after the
> C7 "beta", I was about to announce an actual release, when I
happened
> to discover that HVM guests wouldn't boot -- not under any
> configuration.  This is really basic core functionality that nobody at
> all had tested (or if they had they hadn't complained).  This
> convinced me that I couldn't rely on community testing, and prompted
> me to spend some time writing an automated test suite that would at
> least do a basic smoke-test for a number of configurations.  I've got
> this working for the core xen package, but I was planning on extending
> it to libvirt before declaring CentOS 7 "ready".
A lot of it is market forces. A lot of people who used to run their
own VM's have basically given up, and allow AWS or similar services to
do it for them. Learning a few command line tools is often a *lot*
faster, and cheaper, than running your own virtualization
infrastructure. Heck, I *published* the first public RPM's for Xen,
way back in 1997 before it was bought by Citrix, and I don't have the
time and hardware in hand to do it anymore!

I'm also afraid a lot of us have basically given up on CentOS 7, while
the developer community deals with all the multiple OS issues of the
systemd reworking of network and init configuration, the-arranged
"/bin" versus "/usr/bin" overlap of component locations, and
the
profound lack of EPEL for CentOS 6 or Fedora published perl and python
modules ported to CentOS 7. That's not a CentOS team issue, that's a
RHEL issue, but it's profoundly lowering interest in both hypervisors
and VM's that are CentOS 7 based.
> I would be happy to have help improving the packages.  I would be
> *very* happy to have help maintaining the Xen4CentOS packages, and I
> would be *delighted* if someone wanted to take over maintainership of
> the packages entirely.
>
> FYI I have just finished rebasing things to 4.6-rc2 (there are
> packages in virt7-xen-46-candidate now), and am in the process of
> switching things over to systemd.
And that is one of the parts that is sucking away testing time on a
lot of open source or freeware projects. The systemd integration of
init scripts, networking tools, and the /bin symlink to /usr/bin have
been breaking a *lot* of previously stable components. A lot of us are
basically giving CentOS 7 a miss until and unless the rest of the
stable server community can catch up with the environment changes.

On 09/08/2015 01:02 PM, George Dunlap wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 11:02 PM, T.Weyergraf <T.Weyergraf at
virtfinity.de> wrote:
>
>> First of all, I fully agree, that forked repos are undesirable.
However, to
>> the casual observer (like me), there are hardly any ressources for Xen
on
>> CentOS 7. There are some beta packages, as announced in the start if
this
>> thread, with the latest update being 4.4.2 on 4th of august. I have not
yet
>> found any git repo to check out the current Xen 4 CentOS 7 development
>> effort - only the source rpms to the above packages could be used.
Likewise,
>> the response on the list on the announcements of the Xen on CentOS 7
beta
>> packages was kind of mute and no further updates were given. This led
me to
>> the - apparently false - assumption, that the project kind of fell
asleep.
>> I'd be more than happy to at least test development packages and
give
>> feedback.
>>
>> Your statement "These RPMs are produced by Citrix, so we need to
get the
>> right" irritates me, as I was completely unaware of any
"rights" from Citrix
>> to be waited for.
>>
>> Anyway, I will wait for the official Xen4CentOS packages for CentOS 7
and
>> keep my stuff out of the public to avoid useless forks.
See my comments inline as appropriate
> So actually, the SIGs are supposed to be community efforts -- and my
> long term hope was that once the SIG was "jump-started", that
> community members would step up to take over -- or at least step up to
> help significantly.
Cool. Good to know. Well, while I have been using CentOS for several 
years now in both private and professional setups, I have to admit, that 
so far I did not delve into the community itself and make myself 
familiar with its processes and procedures.
It might be time to change that :)
>
> A number of reasons C7 has "stalled":
>
> * Lack of time on my part. I only work 4 days a week for Citrix, and I
> have significant other duties.  Normally I can only spend a day or so
> a week on CentOS stuff; and in particular, the review load relating to
> the 4.6 feature freeze (beginning of July) was very high.  Then I got
> married and went on holiday for 3 weeks in August, which also didn't
> help. :-)
Well, first of all congrats to your recent marriage! I know what your 
were up to lately, as I did the same some 6+ years ago. And much like 
you, I have to dedicate my personal free-time to any effort.
On the plus side, I am a sysadmin actually using Xen4CentOS on top of 
CentOS 6 in a professional production environment, spanning 50 
virtualisation hosts and running over 600 VMs (over 1,500 pCPUs over 
10Tbytes RAM). So I get pretty much of an impression, what it means to 
actually use Xen4CentOS.
>
> * Apparent lack of testing by the community. About a month after the
> C7 "beta", I was about to announce an actual release, when I
happened
> to discover that HVM guests wouldn't boot -- not under any
> configuration.  This is really basic core functionality that nobody at
> all had tested (or if they had they hadn't complained).  This
> convinced me that I couldn't rely on community testing, and prompted
> me to spend some time writing an automated test suite that would at
> least do a basic smoke-test for a number of configurations.  I've got
> this working for the core xen package, but I was planning on extending
> it to libvirt before declaring CentOS 7 "ready".
You already found out in another post, that I actually did test the 
CentOS 7 packages early in july and reported to the list. That lack of 
any response on my report triggered me to do Xen 4 on CentOS7 packages 
myself.
>
> I'm sorry I haven't been very pro-active about pushing to the xen
> package repository -- I didn't know anyone was looking.  (If you asked
> about it, then I must have missed it.)
See above.
>
> I would be happy to have help improving the packages.  I would be
> *very* happy to have help maintaining the Xen4CentOS packages, and I
> would be *delighted* if someone wanted to take over maintainership of
> the packages entirely.
Well, I'd be happy to help. I can easily test things out on my private 
setup, which is all geared towards Xen and virtualisation anyway, so I 
am all setup. To actually contribute, I would ideally like some git-repo 
to checkout, to prep patches against. Those patches, I could send to you 
for review. If there is some process aligned to "the CentOS way of doing 
things", I would need a pointer to some docs to make myself familiar with.
As I have not the faintest clue about what it takes to actually maintain 
a package, i am - at least now - the inappropriate
person.
>
> FYI I have just finished rebasing things to 4.6-rc2 (there are
> packages in virt7-xen-46-candidate now), and am in the process of
> switching things over to systemd.
Yeah, saw that yesterday in the repo. Ok then, I will fetch it soon and 
start testing it in one of my CentOS-7 Xen guests (I run nested-Xen). If 
that test succeeds, I could update the host. That way, these packages 
would get some real-world test, running my zoo of guests.
Oviously, I'll report my findings.
I would propose to see, if that yields anything useful to the 
development of the Xen4CentOS 7 packages. To actually look into code, 
I'll fetch the source-packages of that repo.
>
> The Virt SIG has IRC meetings on freenode channel #centos-devel every
> two weeks -- the next one is today (8 September) at 2pm BST (3pm UTC).
> If anyone wants to help contribute / see what the status of Xen4CentOS
> is, feel free to pop in.
I popped in late, close to closure of the meeting. I resorted to 
readonly, as I wanted to grasp the "style" and scope of the things 
communicated. Unfortunately, being located in Germany means, that this 
time collides with my work-hours and if I can allocate some time to 
attend remains to be seen.
>
>   -George
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS-virt mailing list
> CentOS-virt at centos.org
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-virt
Regards,
Thomas